This is a monthly series in research and advocacy news summaries created by the PATH residents and medical students. Newsletters will feature brief breakdowns on some of the most recent scholarly publications as well as policy changes and other news related to human trafficking.

Caller Demographics
Between January 1st 2015 to December 31st 2015 the national human trafficking center hotline received almost 22,000 phone calls, 1,275 emails and over 1,500 online tip reports. The top three caller types were community members, victims of trafficking, and NGO Representatives. Medical professionals and friends of victims were equally represented in call volume, and twice as frequently represented as legal, educational, and mental health professionals. About 40% of callers discovered the hotline via internet web search and referral.

Location and Industry
The top 5 states by call volume were California, Texas, Florida, Ohio, New York. A total of 5544 cases of potential human trafficking were identified. The top five venues of potential trafficking were commercial front brothels, hotels and motels, online ads, residential brothels, and street based. Sex trafficking represented about 75% of total cases while Labor represented about 13% of cases. Of note there were 6 cases identified in the health care industry.

Potential Victim Demographics
About 30% of potential victims reported the United States as their country of origin, with International victims originating from a variety of different countries, the 2nd and 3rd highest being Mexico and China with 2% and 1.4% respectively. About 15% of Labor trafficking victims were minors, however fully 33% of sex trafficking victims were minors. About half of Labor trafficking victims were male and about half were female. With regards to sex trafficking cases 91.4% or female and 4.1% were male.

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What’s Up on the Hill:
Business Supply Chain Transparency on Trafficking and Slavery Act of 2015

Latest Action: 7/27/2015 Referred to the House Committee on Financial Services.

About the Act: With this act, Congress recognizes that there legislation is needed to ensure consumers have access to information about how their products are made, specifically that they are free of child labor, forced labor, slavery, and human trafficking. These products include raw materials, goods, and finished products. Consumers and businesses alike would avoid supporting illegally manufactured products through public, mandatory annual disclosures.

The act additionally amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the direction of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Through this commission, regulations for annual reports would be enforced. The report issuers would include entities with over $100 million in global receipts and the reports would focus on how issues of forced labor and trafficking were addressed within the issuer’s supply chain. Additionally, these reports would need to be available to the public in a clear and comprehensible link on the issuer’s website, labeled “Global Supply Chain Transparency.”

Take Home Point: The act would help consumers and businesses to be more aware of products and their origins, enabling the nation to enforce anti-trafficking acts like the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 through conscious capitalism. These previous acts promote anti-trafficking by banning materials and products made by forced labor or trafficking, however there is limited accountability measures for companies to comply with these laws and few cases have been heard in courts. By making annual reports available, customers would become aware of which large companies (those with global receipts over $100 million) are using forced labor and trafficking to product part or all of their products. The reports would require businesses to audit where their labor for their supply chains are coming from and make summaries of those records available to the general public.

Prognosis: The act is in its very early stages, with a committee assigned to review it on August 5th, 2015. The committee has yet to report on it. The bill has a 3% of passing the committee and 1% of being enacted.